


And Piece by Piece

by LittleSammy



Series: Restless [3]
Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-26
Updated: 2012-04-26
Packaged: 2017-11-04 08:41:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/391927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleSammy/pseuds/LittleSammy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sex, much like drugs, is a thing that can take the mind to places it has never been before and to heights it has never seen. But sex, much like drugs, can have side effects, too, and they aren't always pleasant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Piece by Piece

**Author's Note:**

> **warnings & notes - REALLY, READ THEM. I MEAN IT. **  
> This follows "Deprived" and "Fragmented" and deals with what could happen if one didn't take care. If you really are in it just for the romance and some resolution, stick with the first two. If you want to take this one step further into the "What if?" category and you don't mind a harsh sprinkling of angst, then proceed.
> 
>  **To the ones who go into this ZOMGYAYYY!** \-- please keep in mind that I am not a yayyyy!family writer. This isn't a happy!kid!fic. This is all about the painful process of making gargantuan, life-altering decisions. But yes, I do want them to come out on top.
> 
>  **To the ones who (like me, usually) go into this ZOMGBACKBUTTON!** \-- please keep also in mind that I am not a yayyyy!family writer. This isn't a happy!kid!fic. This is all about the painful process of making gargantuan, life-altering decisions. But yes, I do want them to come out on top.
> 
> And finally, none of the views expressed in here come close to my own. They are what felt right for the characters while writing it. It was sometimes downright painful to write, and it might rub one or two of you the wrong way, so proceed with caution.

It was strange how much one tiny slip of plastic could weigh, even when it looked so harmless in its light pink casing, clearly aimed at people who found that color soothing.

Ziva didn't. Ziva felt every ounce of the thin plastic stick that pulled her arm down with the sheer force of it. It was bad enough that she had to place it on the table after only a minute. It was bad enough to make her shoulders hurt because now her muscles tensed up harder than at the time Eli had been in town.

She bit her thumb nail absentmindedly, chewing away at it, and after another minute she jumped to her feet and made coffee, just so she had something else to concentrate on and busy her hands with while she waited.

The test strip glared at her when she came back, mocking her, and somehow she knew before she even looked at it what the result would be.

"Stupid," she muttered, running a hand through her hair and tearing at it until the sting of it made her eyes water. "Stupid, stupid, stupid."

 _'You smell good.'_ The feel of his lips against her neck came back suddenly, such a vivid memory that it made her skin prickle with the ghost of delicious sensation. And she'd succumbed willingly to him that one early morning, when they'd both been tired and distracted and so out of it and into it at the same time, and just this once she had done so without thinking twice about it, without taking precautions, and now, now this came back to bite her.

"Oh God, how could I have been so _stupid?_ " she groaned, biting her lip.

The coffee in her hands grew cold while she tried to get a grip on her madly whirling thoughts. It took her a while until she blinked and snapped out of it.

There were solutions to this.

She chewed on her lip again and tried to breathe calmly while she shrouded herself in strength. At least Tony was out of town for the next couple of days. She wasn't sure she could have dealt with him before she had sorted out this mess on her own.

When she closed her eyes, she found that her fingers began to hurt from the death grip she had on her mug.

*** *** ***

She was pale when she left her doctor's office, clutching a couple of brochures and a sticky note with a phone number on it.

*** *** ***

She didn't feel any better when she asked Gibbs for Thursday off because she had an appointment to take care of.

His eyes narrowed as if he smelled her discomfort, and she flinched when he grabbed her chin to tilt her face into the light and look at her closely. She shrugged out of his grip when he asked her what was up, and she tried her best to evade his eyes while she told him it was just a routine checkup. He didn't reply, but she felt the weight of his curious glances for the rest of the day, and she knew he didn't believe her.

*** *** ***

Leroy Jethro Gibbs wasn't stupid.

He knew that his team sometimes liked to forget that. He also knew that they didn't realize just how much he really noticed while they weren't paying attention. And he sure as hell wasn't about to let them know.

He'd known about Tony and Ziva for quite a while now, maybe even longer than they had known about it themselves. He'd watched them grow closer and break apart and grow closer again over the years. He'd seen the jealousy and possessiveness and the anger and thickheadedness that worked to keep them together even better than it served to keep them apart. He'd also seen the way they had softened up around each other ever since last summer, even though he still wasn't sure what exactly had brought on that change.

And he certainly knew the exact moment when they realized it themselves. 

He wasn't quite sure when they had slept with each other, and dear God, he really didn't want to know more about that. But when they showed up one morning and had suddenly transformed from whatever symbiotic entity they'd been before into something even tighter and closer, Gibbs had no choice but to know.

They were good at not letting it show. Not a single slip of the tongue, not a glance that was out of place -- at least not more out of place than they had been before -- and they were certainly good enough to fool McGee so far. Gibbs, though, saw through their facade as easily as if they'd spray-painted an announcement on the wall of the reception area.

For a few days after that, he had watched them cautiously, itching with the dreadful feeling of premonition, always waiting for the moment when one of them screwed it up and he'd find himself in the middle of a fucking warzone. 

Except that the moment he dreaded never came. He watched them tiptoe around each other for the first few days, careful not to disturb the new balance, trying to find the right way of dealing with each other and the new situation. But after a while, he watched them relax and fall into a comfortable rhythm that worked for them. And so Gibbs relaxed, too.

He hated the fact that six weeks later he still knew dead on when they'd had sex. Because Tony was always much more amiable and friendly on the days following it and Ziva always grew a little more irritable because she was angry with herself at not being able to keep her own fondness towards her partner under tighter control. At the end of the day, it was always McGee caught in the middle and trying to deal with two sets of erratic behavior.

Gibbs really didn't need to know these things. _Really._ But he still couldn't help noticing them. After all these years he was just too attuned to his team and their various tells. 

He eventually developed his own routine of drowning out thoughts of his kids going at it in extra-large rations of coffee and fleeing to the lab until Abby had filled his head with pleasant chatter and upstairs things had settled into the usual rut.

*** *** ***

So, when Ziva came up to him to ask for a day off, her face pale, shadows under her eyes, he thought at first that the war had begun after all. Except that Tony was out of town, so he was pretty sure there had been no opportunity for them to break up. There was always the telephone, of course, but neither of them struck Gibbs as the type to choose that particular way to screw up.

And then she babbled something about a routine checkup, and he knew she was lying the moment the first word left her mouth. She didn't even bother to make it convincing, just stubbornly looked away when he tried to catch her eyes, and that made his gut tighten uncomfortably.

He didn't push her any further. He knew she'd just outright lie to him or not answer at all.

He did watch her carefully for the rest of the day, though. And after she had finished a phone call to confirm her appointment, he stared at the notepad she had scribbled on. She'd taken the original sheet, of course, but later he found that she had forced the letters so hard onto the paper that the address and time were still clearly visible.

*** *** ***

DiNozzo came in for a short briefing about what he had found out a couple of hours after Ziva had gone home, and Gibbs nodded at the appropriate moments and grunted at others. Apparently it worked well enough, maybe because Tony was still tired from the flight, maybe because over the years Gibbs had gotten better at fooling his people.

He would have had a hard time answering correctly if he'd later been asked just what exactly his Senior Field Agent had told him. His thoughts were still spinning around Ziva and the bad feeling spreading in his gut and the fact that the address she had scribbled down seemed too familiar. And that DiNozzo, tired, happy and eager to head home, apparently had no clue that something was coming up hard and fast enough to pull the rug from under his feet.

Leroy Jethro Gibbs was not someone who meddled. He was someone who firmly believed in letting people handle their own affairs and letting them make their own mistakes. Only this time he felt like the outcome would affect him, too -- not the team, not his work, but him, personally. Because he'd lose something as well. And he found that if his gut was right about this one, it was not something he would be able to deal with too well.

"Boss?" Oh jeez, now DiNozzo had caught on after all.

Gibbs raised his head to meet his agent's curious gaze, and after a few moments Tony frowned at him, not sure what was going on.

"Ziva," he sighed, and the mention of his partner's name made Tony's eyes light up in a telltale way. "She won't come in tomorrow. Said she has a medical appointment."

"Med-- wait, what?" Confusion was quickly replaced by concern and a hint of irritability, and Gibbs shrugged while he tried to ignore the subtext screaming at him.

"She wouldn't tell. Said it's routine."

"But you don't think it is...?"

"No." And Gibbs pursed his lips and handed Tony the slip of paper he'd been playing with all afternoon. The younger man stared at the time and address, jotted down in his boss's clear, firm handwriting, with a deep frown.

"That's early," he said. Gibbs watched him carefully. He was still so clueless, but eager, and Gibbs wondered what kind of a man Tony would be the next time he saw him.

"Tony," he sighed, and DiNozzo, who had been about to walk away and call it a night, glanced at him curiously over his shoulder. And dammit, he wanted to smack his kids for not talking properly and for being stupid and for messing this up. 

Except that maybe... maybe they wouldn't. Not if Tony had a say in this.

"You don't want to be late for this one," he said and watched the frown return and deepen. "Trust me."

*** *** ***

He wasn't late. Not after he had found out what waited at the address Gibbs had slipped him.

He even beat Ziva, who was early on an unhealthy level, by half an hour, and the part of him who had hoped she wouldn't show, that this was all just a misunderstanding because she was supposed to accompany a friend or something like that, that part of him deflated when he saw her come up the steps leading to the building.

"Hey," he called, and Ziva stopped dead in her tracks, flinching hard at the sound of his voice. "What's a nice lady like you doing at an abortion clinic so early in the morning?"

He watched the color drain from her face, and he knew that this had been too harsh, too much, but the sudden pain in his gut had forced the words out and he couldn't take them back now, he could just stare at her while she tried to come up with something intelligible to say.

"Tony..." she murmured and then ran out of words again. Her eyes widened in a way that didn't look healthy, and he knew that look because that was the one she gave him only when she knew herself that she had fucked up badly.

He pushed himself off the wall he'd been leaning against and went down a few steps, meeting her in the middle of the stairs and blocking her way.

"Were you even gonna tell me?" he asked, and her cheeks bloomed in an unhealthy flush. Tony found himself blinking, staring at her in sudden shock, wondering how such a sunny morning could leave him so cold all of a sudden.

"There was no point," she said, and her eyes flicked to the side for a moment before she met his gaze stubbornly. "We are both clearly not ready for something like this, so why burden you, too?"

" _'Clearly'?_ " he repeated incredulously, and his tone of voice made her brows furrow.

"Up until very recently having children was not an option I could ever consider for myself," she said, trying to keep her voice calm and reasonable and succeeding only partly. "And you..."

Her voice trailed off, and he knew that what she really wanted to say now was that despite his age he was still a child himself and couldn't take care of one. And yeah, in some ways she may have been right, but he wasn't stupid, and if she'd talked to him about this--

"So not having it is the only option that makes sense to you?" he asked, throwing the pain that slashed through his gut at her.

Something happened to her face then. He watched her expression change from guilt and insecurity into something that told him she had pulled all her walls up around herself and kept him at arm's length again now, just like she had for the better part of the past few years. 

"Yes, Tony," she said, and the eerie firmness in her voice made his skin crawl. "Because I can't do this alone."

"Oh, so what am I, chopped liver?" More pain, and God, he wanted her to not mean it like that, except that his gut told him she had. That she had clearly not counted him among the people she could rely on.

Ziva took a deep breath, and he knew that she didn't mean for her face to soften like it did right then, like she wanted to reach out and ruffle his hair and soothe him with affection. "No," she murmured softly. "Of course not."

And then she did cross the last of the distance between them and put her palm to his cheek. "Answer me truthfully, Anthony," she said very softly, and he blinked, not sure what to think of the way her voice wavered. "This morning. Or the last. Or the week before. Did you wake up and think, hey, I think I want to have kids with that woman?"

God, he loved her too much for his own good, and every time she looked at him like that, she looked straight down into his soul. But sometimes, she only saw what she wanted to see.

"No," he said truthfully, and she nodded sadly. Her hand dropped from his cheek, and she turned as if to walk around him, so he put his arm around her waist and grabbed her coat to keep her right by his side. "But this morning I didn't know that was an option."

She took a deep breath, and the corners of her mouth twisted into the parody of a smile. "It's not."

"How can you say that?" he pressed out, and his voice was strained now. "Like it doesn't mean anything?"

She blinked again, slowly, keeping her gaze carefully fixed on his shoulder. "It only means what we make out of it."

"No," he replied harshly. "No, it means much more, and if you go through with this, it will mess us up, and it will break things between us, just when they've started to come together."

She was quiet for a few too long moments "Do you really think that a child at this point in our lives will not... 'mess us up'?" she finally asked him quietly while she shot him a sideways glance.

"I don't know, Ziva," he said while his hand clenched around the rough wool of her coat and he fought against the temptation to just pull her to his chest and wrap his arms around her until she came to her senses. "But I've only had, what, five minutes to think about it? And that's not really fair."

He watched her while she pressed her lips together hard, thinking furiously. And then something flickered behind her eyes, and she shook her head slowly.

"I'm not ready to be a mother, Tony," she said very, very quietly. "I wouldn't know how."

"You think I know how this works?" he pressed out through his teeth, and this time he tugged at her coat until she was so close he could have kissed her easily. He didn't, but it was tempting, like it always was with her. "But I can learn. People figure this shit out all the time."

She met his gaze calmly, even though he suddenly saw that her eyes were shining in a way he wasn't used to. "Can you honestly say that?" she asked. "Can you look me in the eye and say that _you_ believe you will be a good father?"

It took him a few heartbeats to think about that one, and at first it seemed like an unfair question and one that overwhelmed him because there were so many strings attached to it. 

Except that it wasn't all that hard, not really. Not when he thought about what it took to go through with this.

"I'll do a better job than my old man," he shrugged. He hesitated slightly. Then he added, "And yours."

Ziva blinked, and yeah, her eyes were really wet now, and he would probably never get over how much Ziva in distress affected him. She shook her head slowly, but he decided to push his luck and pull her another notch closer. She didn't refuse and even leaned into him when he pressed his lips to her temple briefly.

"Come on," he murmured, and his lips brushed against her skin in a way that had become too familiar in such a short time. "Let's go home, and then we'll sort this out..."

He felt fresh tension rippling through her body even before she gently freed herself from his embrace. "There is nothing to sort out," she said, and God, yes, the words hurt, and the way her voice trembled hurt, and he had no idea how she could say such things without doubling over from the pain they caused. "This was an accident that should never have happened."

And that made more anger and frustration boil up and mess with him. He tried to control the outburst that suddenly raged through him, but he didn't succeed.

"How do you _know_ that?" he ground out, his voice shaky with anger. "How do you know that this child isn't the one that finds a cure for cancer or gets the Cubs into the World Series or marries a fancy European princess?"

She blinked, staring at him, and even though she clearly wanted to stay at a distance and brace herself for the impact of his words, he suddenly saw a hint of irritation flutter across her face. "Why are you so sure it's a boy?"

He stared back at her, his face hard and still angry. Then he suddenly breathed out, took a step back and sat down on the stairs in front of her. He ran a hand through his hair and looked up at Ziva like a curious spaniel, his head tilted to the side. 

"Hey, by all means, _she_ can marry a fancy princess, too," he quipped with a surprisingly casual shrug. "Pretty sure that's legal by then."

He watched Ziva's eyes widen as his words and the whole magnitude of that statement settled in. A new set of terror rose in her, and suddenly she seemed close to a breakdown. Her walls were crumbling rapidly, and for the first time he got the feeling that she was really thinking about it, all of it, all the implications this new situation could and would bring along. Thinking, not just running away from it because that's what her instincts and her fears and her experiences told her to do.

"I'm bad with girls," she whispered. "You know that."

Her face was so pale all of a sudden that he was afraid he'd actually see her faint for the very first time, right here on the stairs, and he wasn't sure how to deal with this. So he reached for her hand and tugged her towards him again, and because that part of them still worked perfectly, she flowed into the motion easily and settled against his body. She raised her hands and let her fingers run through his hair until he shuddered and pressed his face into her stomach. His own arms came up around her and held her close, not letting her back away again, and when he felt her slump into his embrace, he let out a shaky breath.

"Hear that?" he murmured, and a sudden jerk went through her when she realized that he was talking to her belly this time. "You better be a boy then."

He felt her shudder, not once, but in the unhealthy, recurring way that came with trauma or sickness, and he knew why she was shaking, of course, because right now he felt just the same.

"Aren't you scared?" she suddenly asked, her voice small and lost.

And Tony swallowed hard and then tilted his head back to meet her eyes straight on. He nodded and said firmly, "It scares the crap out of me."

"Then why are you pushing this?" He heard the frustration and the confusion that rang in her words, and he wanted to tell her that he loved her, so badly. Except that he lacked the words for that, and it would make her run, too, and it was only a part of his reasons for this.

"How much family do you have to spare that you can so generously dispose of it?" he asked eventually, and she took in a sharp breath while she tensed in his arms. 

_Family._

He saw the ghosts of memories and old times flutter through her, and he really hoped that she would recall the right ones now, the good ones, the ones that supported him.

"That's... not exactly fair," she said carefully and breathed out again in a slow, carefully controlled manner.

"I know," he nodded, and when he grabbed her hand, he felt her muscles twitch until he ran his thumb across the back to calm her. Then he gave her a wry smile. "Is it working?"

She stared at him for such a long time that he had to fight the urge to shake her and yell at her until he'd be able to draw a reaction out of her. By the time she nodded, very slowly, he felt thoroughly shaken and completely messed up, and it took him a few moments to realize that this time she actually understood him, and that she agreed, and that -- _thank God_ \-- they had finally, finally arrived on the same page. And that maybe they even had a chance at not screwing this up completely.

He felt her hand come up against his cheek, and while her fingers slipped into his hair and found their way to his neck, he raised his arms to wrap them around her waist again and hold her so close this time that she had trouble breathing for a moment. And then she suddenly wrapped her arms around him and clung to him, and he felt her body shake against his while she made a sound deep in her throat, one he had never heard before and hoped to not encounter again. 

He knew that she could probably feel the heat from his face and that she knew the reason why he couldn't look at her right now. Later, he would swear that his eyes had been as dry as the desert the whole time. But right now, they weren't, very much like Ziva's.

**Author's Note:**

> To those who consider asking - no, I will definitely not continue beyond this, because the rest of this, they will have to sort out on their own. But for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I kept thinking of 'Sean'. ;)


End file.
